Category: Travel Stories

Travel Stories

Party in the U.S.A.

We hopped off a plane at MIA, with a dream and our cardigans Welcome to the land of fame excess Whoa, are we [still] gonna fit in? Jumped in the Escalade, here we are for yet another time Look to our right and see the Hollywood (Florida) sign This is all so crazy, everybody seems so famous Our tummys turnin’ (from all the sugary drinks on our connection) and we’re feeling super homesick Too much pressure and we’re nervous That’s when the Dad-man turned on the radio And a Miley song was on… A Miley song was on. So we

Continue reading
Food / Other Countries / Travel Stories

Swiss Efficiency

…and on to our trip to Austria! But not before a 12-hour layover in Zürich, in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Needless to say, we were impressed with that Swiss efficiency from the moment we boarded the plane. When the pilot on Swiss International Airlines tells you it will be one minute until takeoff or ten minutes until landing, you can literally set your watch to it. I tried many different times and they were never wrong. Ten minutes on the dot from announcement to wheels on the ground, each and every time. This still fascinates me. When we told our

Continue reading
Adapting / Getting Acquainted / Incidents and Accidents / Travel Stories

Finding the car(t)oris and driving stick

I have always been fascinated with mechanical things. As a child, I loved playing with LEGO building blocks and looking at the detail in the blown-up pictures of David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work. All of this is to say nothing about my lifelong fascination with every aspect of pinball machines, which as far as I can tell began with Sesame Street. When it came time to pick a major in college, I only wasted one year under the guise of Computer Science before switching to the obvious choice of Computer Engineering, first making sure every class I’d taken thus far

Continue reading
Travel Stories

Don’t be a basic beach.

Yesterday, I nicknamed Dreamer “the Gopher” because of the way she was constantly popping up on our train ride to check out the Mediterranean. It was a very scenic train ride back from Barcelona to Castellón, but out of the corner of my eye – as I was trying to get work done on my laptop – this was quite annoying. Dreamer had picked us seats on the dark side of the train… and I do mean “dark.” Some graffito had completely obscured all the windows on our side of the train and the view was all on the other

Continue reading